Posts tagged archive

Where would we be without digital archives? Not playing old MS-DOS games and browsing defunct GeoCities Labyrinth fan sites while we should be working, that's where. And while some institutions are busying themselves preserving such things as classic literature, one is embarking on a far more impo...

When a video game studio cancels a project, the code tends to stay with the developers or else disappear into the void. Either way, you're unlikely to ever see it. However, the Library of Congress' David Gibson has unearthed a rare gem. While sifting through a stack of games destined for the archi...

Let's face it: We miss out on a ton of great content due to paywalls. After a recent redesign to improve reading via its website across a range of devices, The New Yorker has opened up its archive for the rest of summer free of charge. The repository houses issues dating back to 2007 that will be ...

Like it or not, CDs rot over time -- your well-worn copy of Soundgarden's Superunknown might not play anymore. Just how they rot is frequently a mystery, though, which is why the Library of Congress is currently destroying CDs (including those you donate) in hopes of improving its archival techniq...

Already home to the UK's most iconic national documents from the last millennium, The National Archives is expanding its digital collection by going social. It's begun archiving tweets and YouTube videos published by the UK's ruling parties over the last decade, permanently preserving them as the o...

An internet connection is usually the only thing between you and your remotely stored data. Not with IDrive's new "Safe" service, however, which is a strange mix of traditional archiving and newfangled cloud storage. For a one-off payment of $100, the company'll send you a physical 1TB hard drive ...

If you need an illustration of the problems with overly stringent copyright laws, look no further than the British Library. The institution has just made its archive of UK website domains available to the public, but you can't actually visit it from the web -- the Legal Deposit Libraries Act requi...

If you're worried that Facebook knows too much about you, you'll be glad to know that a University of Wisconsin team is returning the favor; it just launched The Zuckerberg Files, an attempt to collect everything that Mark Zuckerberg has said in public. The archive currently offers nearly 50 video...

One of the inherent downsides of technology's rapid advancement is how much of its history gets left behind with each new plateau we reach. However, the great minds at the Internet Archive (IA) have come up with a way to not only preserve our past, but make it accessible via the Javascript MESS em...

The British Film Institute promised that it would put 10,000 movies online as part of the Film Forever initiative, and it's now making good on its word -- if slowly. The Institute will launch the first phase of its BFI Player streaming service on October 9th with a library of more than 1,000 vide...

Google's social networking effort Buzz shut its doors last year but has popped up yet again, for what may be the last time. In an email that just went out to former users, Google noted it's packaging Buzz data into two files which will be stored on their Drive accounts. One is private, which will ...

If you were ever paranoid that your employer was reading your social media missives, imagine being the subject of some future student's grad school thesis. From tomorrow, Britain's six biggest libraries will be entitled to crawl and archive the web in an attempt to create the UK's official digital...

The phrase "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" applies as much to tweets as it does to monumental events. While a select few have been able to download their microblogging archives since the end of last year, Twitter now expanding the site's archive access to users in 1...

WoW has been out for so long that it's actually a little difficult to remember a time when it wasn't out, but a little trip in the Wayback Machine proves that, yes, WoW was not yet released in 2003. You can check out the original World of Warcraft website, complete with six (not eight) races, s...

A "small percentage" of Twitter users may have noticed the feature earlier this week, but the rest of us should officially have access to the service's archive tool soon. After downloading your own Twitter archive, you'll be able to launch an HTML file that provides a familiar web interface, but w...

Systems such as the ColecoVision, TurboGrafx-16 and 3DO may have been ousted from most home entertainment centers long ago, but they still have shelf space at the University of Michigan's Computer and Video Game Archive. Slashdot caught up with Engineering Librarian and Video Game Archivist Dave C...

Amazon's S3 cloud service has proved a popular proposition, with many large web enterprises happily depending on it (most of the time) to serve up its content. Now, the internet retail giant is offering a similar product, aimed squarely at archives, called Glacier. The idea seems pretty simple, st...

Frustrated by a lack of access to your thoughts and feelings about world events and sandwiches circa 2008? Twitter's working on a way to let users export and download old tweets into a file, according to CEO Dick Costolo. As far a service for search all users, the exec doesn't see such a solution ...

The Peel Sessions -- those are three blissful words to any music enthusiast. John Peel's BBC radio show was the stuff of legends. It launched entire careers and created a legacy of eclectic and intimate musical snapshots by our favorite artists. Can you imagine exploring his record collection? Wel...

Google today announced the grand opening of the Nelson Mandela Digital Archive, an online collection of digitized photos, videos and documents centering around the former South African president. The site, based out of the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory in Johannesburg, South Africa, was develope...